More Links About HTML5

November 23, 2010

I’ve been reading more and more articles about HTML5 over the past few weeks and thought I’d just share the most recent few that I’ve found to be interesting.

Dive Into HTML5 is the most interesting, although it’s also the longest of these resources. This is the online version of the book Dive Into HTML5, by Mark Pilgrim, published by O’Reilly. It’s really well written and approachable. With the online version, you can test most of the new features immediately in your browser.

HTML5Rocks/ is simple and interactive and shows lots of specific features.

WTF is HTML5 is just an image presenting the range of what’s falling under the “HTML5” umbrella, as well as current browser support.

Finally, to see how your browser does with HTML5’s expected new features, check out The HTML5 Test.

All of this is in my mind lately, as I just started writing the fourth edition of my “PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide” book, and I had to decide what version of HTML or XHTML to use. I very strongly considered switching to HTML5, at the very least because HTML5 is so much easier to code (check out the basic syntax of an HTML5 document and compare it with, say, an XHTML 1.0 Transitional one). But I couldn’t in good conscience suggest the reader use something that’s not officially released yet, will work unpredictably on multiple browsers, and could change in any number of ways before the final release comes out. All this is even more true after the bit of a debacle I had trying to use PHP 6 with another book! So the book uses XHTML, as did the previous edition, but clearly HTML5 is the biggest change in Web development since…I dunno…but when HTML5 does officially come out, it will have an impact.